Re: [gentoo-dev] spotify license

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 10:17 AM, Matthew Thode
<prometheanfire@g.o> wrote:
> It's looking hard to be able to add the spotify ebuild to tree because
> of licensing concerns.
>
> http://www.spotify.com/us/legal/end-user-agreement/

That doesn't really look like a license to me.  It seems to be more
like the terms of use of their service.  I don't really see much
"license" to do anything, but they do point out they'll sue you if you
do something they don't like.

>
> 10:02 <  prometheanfire > do you have a plaintext version? I can copy
> the text, but just thought I'd ask :D
> 10:02 <     dan^spotify > No, and copy+pasting it into a text file isn't
> something we really want you to to do, since it changes from time-to-time

As long as we restrict mirroring, perhaps the license in portage
should just say "Spotify has an end-user license agreement governing
their service and software that they change from time to time.  Please
refer to their website for details.  It is not clear that
redistribution of their software is permissible."

> They want it to be accepted through the app.  Is there a way this is
> compatible with Gentoo?
>
> Any advice would be appreciated.

So, my two cents are that any issues around "license acceptance" to
USE spotify have nothing to do with Gentoo (I'd go a step further and
state that there is no such thing as license "acceptance" in the first
place - licenses are merely statements that you are permitted to do
something under certain conditions and if you don't follow the
conditions then you may or may not be permitted to do something).  I
wouldn't go removing any prompts/etc they put in their software, but
we don't need to go adding them either.  They are free to put
conditions on the use of their service, and communicate them to their
customers.  We don't distribute their software (RESTRICT=mirror), so
we aren't really a party to the matter.

Rich